Friday, July 24, 2009

"People say bureaucrats never do anything. The bureaucrats of CBO might have killed health care."

The White House misread the national mood. The problem isn’t that they didn’t “bend the curve,” or didn’t sell it right. The problem is that the national mood has changed since the president was elected. Back then the mood was “change is for the good.” But that altered as the full implications of the financial crash seeped in. The crash gave everyone a diminished sense of their own margin for error. It gave them a diminished sense of their country’s margin for error. Americans are not in a chance-taking mood. They’re not in a spending mood, not after the unprecedented spending of the past year, from the end of the Bush era through the first six months of Obama. Here the Congressional Budget Office report that a health care bill would not save money but would instead cost more than a trillion dollars in the next decade was decisive. People say bureaucrats never do anything. The bureaucrats of CBO might have killed health care.

I must say that I have little (okay, almost no) faith in bureaucrats but in this case, the CBO rose to the occasion and we should give credit where credit is due.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

"Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the pain killer.."

He didn't really say that, did he? I must say I was appalled when watching this ABC news clip of Obama making this ludicrous statement to the daughter of a now 105-year-old woman who needed a pacemaker (she needed the surgery at 99). The daughter in question, Jane Sturm, was asking the President if he thought medical criteria such as age should be used or should quality of life and joy be important in making the decision to provide care. From his answer, which basically boils down to "Mom can take a pain pill," Obama shows himself not only to have no understanding of medicine, life, or the science of improving people's lives, but no empathy for those of us who have life threatening illnesses that require immediate medical intervention.

Some heart arrhythmias are deadly, and a doctor telling a patient to take a pain killer to treat V-tach or V-fib should be guilty of malpractice. For example, the American Heart Association states:

The term "arrhythmia" refers to any change from the normal sequence of electrical impulses. The electrical impulses may happen too fast, too slowly, or erratically – causing the heart to beat too fast, too slowly, or erratically.

When the heart doesn’t beat properly, it can’t pump blood effectively. When the heart doesn’t pump blood effectively, the lungs, brain and all other organs can’t work properly and may shut down or be damaged.

Heart arrhythmias can be absolutely terrifying leading to panic attacks and/or fatigue so crippling that one cannot get off the couch. A pain killer is not going to help. But maybe that's the idea. Obama is so determined to get his health care plan passed--no matter what the consequences-- that he doesn't care how or if people suffer, especially older people.